All Kinds of Nuns Found to Be Not Too Saintly

More than two decades ago, a music professor was doing some research on music manuscripts and found a saucy few lines written at an Italian convent in the 16th century:

You who’ve got that little trinket/ So delightful and so pleasing/ Might I take my hand and sink it/ ’Neath petticoat and cassock, squeezing.

Whatever did they mean? The professor, Craig A. Monson, decided to delve deeper into the secret lives of nuns, and now he’s written a whole book about it: Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art & Arson in the Convents of Italy. Monson sheds light on what we already know from random books and films: that people would sometimes just send their daughters off to convents, not only if they’d done something bad, but because it was cheaper than finding them a husband. And it wasn’t so bad there! “Nuns also elected their own superiors, which gave them a certain degree of independence.”

But “that’s where the trouble began,” Monson says. He uncovered stories of:

…nuns who plotted escapes, who burned down their own convent, and one who got caught sneaking out to the opera, disguised as an abbot.